Coke's Grand Theft Auto

It's always nice being a marketer of a multinational and the guys overseas actually manage to make some ads that you can run in your own country.

It will be interesting to see if Aussie marketers of Coke take their Grand Theft Auto ad from the States and run it over here. I don't reckon you would need to change a thing.

The ad has had millions of hits on Youtube, GoogleVideo, gaming sites etc and been a big viral success.

An interesting point has been raised by some bloggers about how media agencies should manage something like this. Why put an ad like this on TV (where the media agency makes their money) when the agency can upload it to a few sites for free and let viral take over.

The only risk is that if it doesn't take off, you're left without a campaign. Two things then.....if it's not a hit with the target audience then maybe the ad wasn't that great to begin with.

Secondly, perhaps marketers need to work another 4 months in advance. Launch the viral and you'll know in a month if it's not working. Then you still have 12 weeks to get the ad on TV with enough time to negotiate a good buy.

I still believe the only way a media agency can provide total media-neutral solutions to a campaign is to do away with the upfront negotiations with the TV networks at the start of the year where a committment is put in place to spend x amount. The majority of companies still do this. And that's probably why a lot of campaigns, especially in FMCG, all look the same.